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Idiomatic Expressions in Evelyn Waugh´s
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Bachelor thesis
English Language

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PREŠOVSKÁ UNIVERZITA V PREŠOVE

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Mgr. K. Gibová, 2009

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PREŠOVSKÁ UNIVERZITA V PREŠOVE


FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA


Katedra anglickej jazykovedy a didaktiky


Idiomatic Expressions in the Original and Translation

of Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall"


(A Linguistic-Translatological Analysis)

Bakalárska práca

List of abrreviations


SL - source language

TL - target language

DaF - Decline and Fall

ZaP - Zostup a pád

SAFS - Slovensko-anglický frazeologický slovník (Kvetko P., 1996)


Abstract


HÁJIK, : Idiomatic Expressions in the Original and Translation of Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall" [BA Thesis]. University of Prešov. Faculty of Arts; Institute of English and American Studies; Supervisor: Mgr. Klaudia Gibová - Prešov: University of Prešov, IAA

FF, 2009. - 59 pp.


This bachelor’s thesis focuses on the linguistic basis of idioms and their various equivalence possibilities during the process of translation of fiction. It introduces different approaches to defining and characterising idioms from a linguistic and translatological point of view. It also specifies the issue of employing formal and dynamic equivalence.

Consequently, theoretical conclusions are applied to the particular excerpted idiomatic expressions sourced from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Decline and Fall and its corresponding Slovak translation. The thesis attempts to contrast the original idiomatic expression and its translation equivalent and evaluate the concrete approach applied in translation.


Key words:

Idiom. Phraseological unit. Translation. Equivalent.


Abstrakt


HÁJIK, : Idiomatické výrazy v origináli a preklade diela Evelyna Waugha "Zostup a pád" [Bakalárska práca]. Prešovská univerzita. Filozofická fakulta. Inštitút anglistiky a amerikanistiky; Vedúca práce: Mgr. Klaudia Gibová - Prešov: Prešovská univerzita, IAA FF, 2009. – 59 s.


Práca sa zameriava na linguistický základ idiómov a rôznych možností ekvivalencie v procese prekladu. Predstavuje rozdielne prístupy v definovaní a charakteristike idiómov z linguistického a translatologického hľadiska. Taktiež špecifikuje problematiku využitia formálnej a dynamickej ekvivalencie.

Následne sú teoretické závery aplikované na konkrétne excerpované idiomatické výrazy z románu Evelyna Waugha Zostup a pád a jeho slovenského prekladu. Práca sa pokúša dať do protikladu pôvodný idiomatický výraz a jeho prekladový ekvivalent ako aj zhodnotiť konkrétny prístup v preklade idiómov.


Kľúčové slová:

Idióm. Frazeologická jednotka. Preklad. Ekvivalent.

Table of contents


List of abbreviations

4

Abstract

5

Abstrakt

5

Introduction

7

1

Theoretical part

9

1.1

A brief history of idiomaticity issues

9

1.2

English vs. Slovak phraseology

11

1.3

Idioms

12

1.3.1

Degrees of idiomaticity

14

1.3.2

Criteria concerning idiomatic expressions

15

1.3.2.1

Figuration - metaphor, metonymy

15

1.3.2.2

Informality and effect

16

1.4

Collocations

17

1.5

Linguistic approach - a structural model

19

1.6

Translatological approach

20

1.6.1

Nida’s concept of formal and dynamic equivalence

20

1.6.2

English and Slovak idioms - translation view of Pavol Kvetko

22

1.6.2.1

Translation (functional) equivalents

22

2

Practical part

25

2.1

Theoretical background

25

2.2

Paremiological expressions

26

2.2.1

Biblical proverbs and citations

26

2.2.2

Sayings and other catchphrases

30

2.2.3

Popular quotations - original phrase

31

2.3

Non-paremiological expressions

32

2.3.1

Phrasal verbs

32

2.3.2

Similes

33

2.3.3

Binomials

36

2.3.4

Social formulae

37

2.3.5

Idioms containing numerals and metric system

38

2.3.6

Regionally restricted idioms

40

2.4

Non-idiomatic translation of the source language

40

2.5

Idiomatisation of the target language

43

3

Conclusion

48

4

Résumé

50

5

Bibliography

52

Appendix: List of excerpted English idioms with Slovak equivalents

54

Data form

59

Introduction

When learning a foreign language, everyone has been confronted with a situation where one has been able to understand meanings of all the words in a sentence, even though one has not been able to identify the meaning of the whole sentence, as something has obstructed the process of meaning interpretation.

Consequently, this represents a rather demotivating aspect of foreign language learning when one can understand all the expressions in a sentence, and yet he cannot comprehend its whole meaning. On the other hand, a similar situation can be observed when translating from our mother tongue (source language) into English, for instance, when metaphorical expression cannot be translated by means of word.....[read full text]

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1 Theoretical Part

1.1 A brief history of idiomaticity issues

After studying theoretical secondary sources, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that phraseology as a distinct field has never really taken hold in Anglo-American linguistics. Despite recent developments in the field of contrastive and translation linguistics, idiomatic expressions still pose a serious challenge for translators and foreign language teachers as well.

All in all, three main periods of idiom investigation can be distinguished, notably, the very beginning of the 20th century, the next in the 1950s when the work in the field was resumed thanks to theoretical developments. The late 80s and 90s brought about results of great interest, probably owing to the linguists’ inclination to pragmatics and psycholinguistics.

The ice of phraseology was broken by the first pioneering book Words and Idioms (1925) published by Logan Smith including the essay named English Idioms where the greatest number of examples were gathered and even classified. Moreover, Smith coined the famous super temporal simile: Idioms are like little sparks of life and energy in our speech. Another pioneering scholar of the former half of the 19th century, Murat Roberts considered idioms to belong to the primarily to discourse and are believed to originate as innovations of individuals.

Similarly to Smith’s simile Roberts remarkably specified idioms as a mental monument of history. Surprisingly, since their contemporaries led by Leonard Bloomfield refused semantic studies, idioms were disregarded and the internal structure of set phrases was ignored as well. Simply, structuralism as a stream in linguistics tried to establish precise patterns and rules for language structures and idioms inherently displaying deviant semantic structure and embodying something special could not comply with them and were simply beyond structuralisms’ efforts. On the other hand, Charles Hackett is believed to be the first to offer a very formal definition of the concept of idiom.

He explicitly groups set phrases together with compounds and unit words as idioms, so long as they demonstrate no obvious connection with the meaning of their components. After decades of idioms being dismissed as a marginal subject of linguistic research the 1950s and 70s could witness a new wave of revival when the positive approach to idioms became the domain of interest of individuals rather than linguistic schools.

Various definitions and theories have been introduced. The most prominent and accepted even up to the date is the generative approach of Jerold Katz and Paul Postal (1963). Two fairly novel proposals that they have offered were (1) the separation of the lexicon into two parts, namely the lexical part and the phrase-idiom part, and (2) the introduction of criterion .....

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As Pavol Kvetko states, there are some differences between English and Slovak as far as terminology of the basic unit of phraseology is concerned. In Slovak phraseology, the first term for the basic unit was set expression (ustálené spojenie). This term was later followed by another one. It was verbal idiom or clause idiom (frazeologický zvrat).

Mlacek claims that as far as the semantic classification is concerned idiom is synonymous with phraseological fusion (frazeologický zrast). Nowadays in Slovak phraseology the term phraseological unit (frazéma) is used to name the basic unit in contrast with the English linguistic tradition which prefers the term idiom.

This attitude can be explained by the fact that phraseology as a term does not cover the vast domain of idiomaticity issues and refers primarily to lexis and grammatical structures whereas idioms (idiomatic expressions) are based on semantic rather than lexical grounds. Furthermore, Pavol Kvetko underlines that the meaning of the idiom in English can be ambiguous.

It coincides with Slovak terms such as: štýl, jazyk, frazeológia, frazéma, idióm. Except the term idiom, phraseological unit can be also called idiomatic expression, idiomatic phrase or even phrase (Kvetko 2006: 17).

Taking into account the political development in the prolific period of Slovak linguistics in the 20th century, Slovak phraseology as a separate linguistic discipline, having its roots in the early 50’s, was probably critically influenced by the former Soviet Union linguists using the term phraseological unit mostly preferred by Natalija Amosova and Viktor Vinogradov.

Thus the present-day Slovak phraseology tends to use the term idiom when concerning the units typical for a certain language or to name totally opaque expressions (Kvetko 2006: 16).


1.3 Idioms

Expressions like to be a swell (DaF, p. 99), by a long chalk (DaF, p. 101) or even bring out (DaF, p. 173) can be difficult to understand since their meaning is different from the meanings of the separate words in the whole expression. Expressions like these are called idioms (Swan 1996: 243). According to Simpson (2004: 93), idioms have their origin in metaphors which have become fixed phrases in language.

They are frequently referred to as clusters of words whose meaning can be hardly deduced from their constitue.....

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As stated in the introduction of this thesis, the broadest use of the term idiom including different types of multi-word expressions is employed when excerpting and examining them. The common Slovak and English division in idioms with a high degree of adverbiality so called paremiological and their counterparts - non-paremiological expressions is taking place in the practical part of this thesis.


To summarize the above written features of idioms, it can be claimed that an idiom is composed of individual words which themselves can appear separately in various linguistic contexts and that the meaning of an idiom can hardly be deduced from its constituent parts, as the constituents assembled together usually create a different meaning than the idiom itself.

Consequently, it is often a highly complex and even unenviable task to translate an idiom into another language without any previous knowledge of its meaning in context. This is supported by Swan’s concept of uniqueness of idioms for a particular language; he claims in his book Practical English Usage (1996: 244) that idioms are usually special to one language and cannot be translated word for word (though related languages may share some idioms).

1.3.1 Degrees of idiomaticity

“What is and what is not an idiom is, then, often a matter of degree. It is very difficult, moreover, to decide whether a word or a sequence of words is opaque” (Palmer 1976: 99). The degree of opaqueness of the individual idioms can be even measured. The measurements have resulted in creation of the term “degrees of idiomaticity”.

According to Fernando and Flavell (1981: 19) there are “varying degrees” of idiomaticity correlating with different types of categories of idioms. Their classification of idioms is based on the degree of motivation, that is on semantic intelligibility. A distinction is made among four categories of idioms:

1)      Transparent expressions, which are not idioms, but free collocations with a literal meaning derived from the meanings o.....

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Out of a great number of criteria and classifications of idiomatic expressions the three most significant of them will be pointed out, namely those based on figuration, informality and effect that bear importance throughout the whole concept of idiomaticity of the literal genre.

1.3.2.1 Figuration - metaphor, metonymy

At first, the definitions describing metaphor and metonymy should be mentioned, though they will be described only briefly, as they are not the major concern of this thesis. Hence the definitions given by Hladký (1996) are sufficient for our purposes.

Metaphor (μεταφεριν = carry over) can be described as a word or a set of words which is based on similarity but the ground of comparison cannot be directly seen, as in the simile.

The notion of metonymy (μετωνυμια) “is based on substitution of a word referring to an attribute for a word referring to the thing meant, e.g. a part and a whole, a higher and a lower category, a thing and its place, cause and result etc.” (Hladký 1996: 51).

These two definitions are helpful in revealing the connection between metaphors and metonymies on one side, and idioms on the other, at least to some extent. There is a feature that is characteristic for both metonymies and metaphors – the semantic shift (ibid.). Consequently, we can “view metaphor and metonymy as cognitive mechanisms that relate a domain (or domains) of knowledge to an idiomatic meaning in an indirect way” (Kővecses, Szabó, 1996).

It should be stated that metaphors and metonymies play an important part in adding contextual vividness and strength, on the other hand they can express stylistically more or less neutral connotation in the SL that occasionally may represent an inadmissible element in the TL language translation. To put the record straight, it will be focused on the actual censure and text violation of Waugh’s sarcasm and metala.....

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Admittedly, the given excerpted idiomatic expressions can be characterized by an undoubtedly higher degree of emotional colouring and expressivity.

1.4 Collocations

Traditionally, collocations defined as the “habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items” (Cruse 1986: 40) are structurally and semantically distinguished from idioms, nonetheless they possess a certain degree of semantic cohesion and mutual selection of individual items within their structure.

This characteristics makes them worth mentioning in the thesis. As seen below, a collocation typically consists of lexical items that enter mainly into high-frequency grammatical structures:

(1) Adjective plus noun

a difficult time (p. 9) - krajne nepríjemne (p. 7)

a heavy bill (p. 11) - poriadne mastný účet (p. 8)

a regular Tartar (p. 24) - skutočný tyran (p. 23)

(2) Noun plus noun (i.e. double-noun compound)

head boy (p. 11) - predseda (p. 9)

essay prize (p. 11) - prvá cena v esejistickej súťaži (p. 9)

assistent master (p. 16) - praktikant (p. 16)


(3) Verb plus object, which is normally a noun that denotes an action

have (great) fun (p. 11) - pobaviť sa (p. 9)

give a sigh (p.13) - vydýchnuť si (p. 10)

give a (shrill) laugh (p. 21) - za.....

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